When the microwave dinged, Larry got himself a Coors and a fork. Then he checked his fingers for gray flakes. Sometimes a dozen or so would get under the nails—little gray crescents. He would make a joke of it. “I wonder who’s coming to dinner tonight?” he might say. Or, “Who’s going to sleep with me tonight?”
Larry saw some gray and went to the sink, scrubbed his hands with Borax and a nailbrush. It was probably the old lady who’d given him the ring, the one brought in early that evening from Ocean Breezes. He gave a little salute as the water swirled down the drain: “Thanks, sweetheart.”
• • •
Acting chief Fred Bonaldo was home in his smoking room, wearing his new chief’s uniform with its gold braid. His attitude was that he might as well wear it now, because pretty soon he’d be out on his ass. Like he’d be the first to admit he was in over his head, which meant if he got fired he would never march as a cop in the Memorial Day parade. He’d be stuck with the Masons again, not that they weren’t a bunch of great guys.
It wouldn’t be so bad to admit he was in over his head if a lot of other people—even women, like his wife—didn’t also keep telling him he was in over his head. He had liked Woody Potter, but now Woody was barely polite. Had Fred forgotten to do this; had Fred forgotten to do that? Was it his fault Alice Alessio had vanished? Hopper had been watching her and slipped away to grab a grinder. They didn’t call him Whole-Hog Hopper for nothing.
Then the Oswego business—what did Carl Krause have to do with anything, anyway? Reporters, FBI, helicopters—this was a quiet town. Fred had never counted on abductions, and although the scalping had happened in South Kingstown’s jurisdiction—thank God for that—Hartmann had been hanging around in Brewster, and so people kept thinking it was his business. Well, he had two men watching Peggy Summers’s house. No way could she sneak off. Whole-Hog would be fine as long as he had someone to keep him from the trough.
On top of everything else, the Krause kid kept calling him—though he wasn’t a Krause; he was Hercel something. Somehow Hercel had gotten his private cell phone number and kept calling to ask when he’d get his snake back. How the heck should he know? The snake was the center of the whole investigation, just like a gun in a murder investigation. So he couldn’t just give it back, no matter how much the kid asked. And the kid had a voice like a robot: “May-I-have-my-snake-back-please.” It made Fred want to tear his hair that had gone south long ago, because every fuckup was another nail in the coffin of his career.
And Krause was another sore spot. Fred had almost dropped a big smelly load when Krause pointed that shotgun at him. He thought he’d just bought the farm. He had meant to call over to Oswego, like Woody told him, but he plain forgot. And how was he supposed to think with helicopters buzzing around and a hundred reporters crowding him and asking if there’d been new developments? He should have taken a lesson from Baldo and said, “Pull my finger.”
It seemed the only way Fred could save his job was to do something dramatic, like grabbing a kid from a burning house or shooting it out with crooks. But no way would that happen. At times he might be dramatic, but he’d never been brave. And it could get worse. That evening Woody said he was chasing down some witches. Fred laughed till he saw Woody wasn’t making a joke. So the witch business might go someplace, but the trouble with stuff going out of control was everyone ended up hating everyone else, which made it hard for someone like Fred, whose single purpose in life was to be well liked.
• • •
In Brewster the wind picked up and the sky cleared as clouds headed off elsewhere, blowing across the face of the partial moon as if the moon itself were in a hurry. By midnight the town was mostly dark. Woody Potter was finishing some paperwork in police headquarters, which meant filling out the forms of the National Incident-Based Reporting System, breaking everything into categories, numbers, and capital letters, but which did not, as Fred Bonaldo had observed, tell you whether a snake was a weapon, perpetrator, or victim; and scalping could only be listed as “other.”
Elsewhere, Sister Chastisement had come over from Narragansett to spank a lawyer, whose buns were like bowling balls from hours in the gym. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” she said. Father Bob at St. Michael’s watched High Noon on Turner Classic Movies. He recalled how half a century earlier Katy Jurado’s décolletage had led him to masturbate, and on Saturday he’d confessed it to Father Joseph, whose answer was always “boys will do that,” as he doled out Hail Marys and Our Fathers.
Ginger and Howard Phelps were again playing gin rummy, and Ginger was winning. That’s because Howard kept thinking of Carl Krause, who’d passed him on the sidewalk that afternoon and growled. When he had fired Carl, he’d been unsure whether or not to call the police. He’d never heard anybody shout at a customer like that. Howard had been in his office and heard it from that far away. When he went to speak to Carl, the customer fled, though other people had also been there and all looked at Carl as if he were crazy. Once Howard had learned what’d happened, he had no choice but to fire him. Even then he had thought Carl was about to go berserk and strike him. But then Howard tried to put it behind him. No point in letting Carl rent space in his head. And he had hoped the same was true of Carl, that he’d put the whole business behind him. But then came the growling, and what was Howard to make of it?
Harriet Krause was asleep, and so was her daughter, Lucy. Carl was upstairs, watching the knotholes move. Three times he’d heard the cat out in the hall, but when he had flung open the door the cat was gone.
Jean Sawyer was lying in bed next to her sleeping husband, reading a romance novel, The Virgin’s Debauch. Every time she tried to sleep, she pictured poor Mr. Hartmann lying scalped out there in the swamp, and it gave her the shivers. Twice she’d nudged Frankie, hoping for some solace, but he lay there dead to the world, the pig.
Todd Chmielnicki sat on a small rug, staring at a bare white wall in his apartment, more of a monk’s cell than a home. Although his eyes were open, he saw nothing. What does it mean to be liberated from reality? And why would anybody do it? Chmielnicki was focused on the first of the upper limbs of Ashtanga. His mind had turned from the world to concentrate on a spot between his eyebrows; his brain and senses were deep in communication with one another as he moved into his interior. Were an explosion to occur in his room, he wouldn’t notice. He will stay this way all night.
Jill Franklin was proofreading her story for Saturday’s paper, in which the snake’s name, Satan, figured prominently. She had also learned from “a source” at URI that the mud found on the floor of the hospital nursery had most likely come from Great Swamp. This, too, was information that other papers didn’t have. If she could rack up more of those, it might be a pathway to a job at the ProJo, a real paper.
From the other room her six-year-old son muttered in his sleep. Some nights Luke called out “Daddy!” at times as a cry of help, at times in yearning. Each time was like a knife through Jill’s gut. Luke had never known his daddy. She and Derek had split up two months before Luke had been born. “I don’t want to be tied down,” he had said. As far as she knew, he was still tending bar in Boulder. He’d never shown any interest in getting to know his son.
It was about time, Jill thought, that Luke had a real father, or at least a gentle and loving stepfather. All day she’d been thinking Woody would be a perfect candidate for the role. The only problem was that he hated her.
Of course, other people were also awake—Vicki Lefebvre; Dr. Fuller; Mayor Hobart; Harriet’s best friends, Anita Barr and Amy Calderone—as well as hundreds of others in South County, a name that contains Washington and part of Kent County. Winter’s approaching; Halloween’s almost upon us. High above town a flock of geese noisily flies south, looking like fleeting insects across the moon. It’s doubtful they look down. What do they know of the complexities of human emotion beneath them—the guilt, ambition, fear, joy, and rank desire?
It’s ridiculous to think that the
y might notice the alcove in front of Crandall Investments is empty except for a tattered sleeping bag. And where is Ronnie McBride, who sleeps there on most nights? He seems to have disappeared.
• • •
On Woody’s drive home there was a moment when he almost turned toward Dr. Joyce Fuller’s condo in Narragansett. Last night he had helped her and tonight she could help him, though it wasn’t conversation he wanted but to climb into her bed. And it wasn’t Dr. Fuller in particular he wanted, but the embrace of another body. Dr. Fuller was just the one he felt he stood the most chance with. Mostly Woody’s self-discipline held him together in adversity. Now it felt weakened. But it wasn’t one thing that bothered him but a whole collection: Susie’s departure, the inexplicable missing baby and murder of Ernest Hartmann, the missing Nurse Spandex, Todd Chmielnicki’s unsettling observations, his own fragile emotional state and temper. He felt hanging on to a warm female body could help him with this. Almost any female body would be a huge improvement over Ajax, who sensed something was wrong and kept leaning over the center console to lick his face.
That evening Woody had met Sister Asherah MacDonald, who taught meditation and holistic health at You-You. She was a fifty-eight-year-old lesbian, plump and wearing a loose ankle-length blue dress, and kept her long gray hair in a ponytail. Woody realized he had seen her before, or rather he’d seen her car—a light blue Prius with about twenty bumper stickers, such as FAT PEOPLE ARE HARDER TO KIDNAP, GOD IS COMING AND SHE IS ANGRY, MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOM, A DAY WITHOUT FAIRIES IS LIKE A DAY WITHOUT SUNSHINE, TREE-HUGGING DIRT WORSHIPPER, and WE ARE EVERYWHERE.
With a round, beaming face, she seemed, Woody thought, militantly benign, but who knows how deep it went. She lived with her partner, Sister Isis, in an old farmhouse at the edge of town. That afternoon she had greeted Woody with seeming delight, which, he guessed, was how she greeted everyone. The hard part in listening to her was he had to be careful not to filter her words through his cynicism.
She belonged to a coven of thirteen women who met with other covens for the eight Sabbats—two solstices, two equinoxes, May Day, Halloween, August 1, and Groundhog Day, also known as Candlemas; and the Esbats, which occurred on each of the year’s full moons. Wiccans appeared to be great partiers, with lots of dancing, singing, and the casting of benign spells. As Sister Asherah described it, the gatherings sounded like good clean fun and a little dull. She, too, spoke of the Eternal Return, the cycle of birth and rebirth. Woody couldn’t tell if it was a lesbian thing, and he didn’t know how to ask her. As for shape-shifting, she had heard of it being done, but her own coven had been unsuccessful in those areas. Sister Asherah said she was appalled by the baby’s abduction and Hartmann’s murder. Perhaps that was true. She had heard of Satanists in Rhode Island, but she knew none, nor was she interested in meeting any. Wiccans condemned selfishness and self-indulgence, and, like Christians, favored reciprocity: Do unto others as you’d have others do unto you. Finally, she gave him the names of several other Wiccans. Woody said he’d be in touch.
The only link with Wiccans, Woody thought as he drove home, was the coin. Hartmann had also shown it to another investigator in his Boston office and had said it had something to do with graves, perhaps Indian graves—the man had hardly paid attention. Woody hoped to keep its existence silent. To add witches to the subjects of snakes, abductions, and scalping would bring back the helicopters with a vengeance.
He reached home at twelve-fifteen, fed the animals, and tumbled into bed half dressed. All night, it seemed, he dreamed of fleeing through a forest at dusk; something was pursuing him, but he never got a good look at it.
EIGHT
WHEN HERCEL AWOKE Saturday morning he had no idea where he was. The room was suffused with the faint red light of dawn that reflected off the glass of the picture frames and slowly moved down the spines of the books in the bookcases. He didn’t recognize the curtains, with their red stripes and vertical trellises of red roses, or the red-and-blue rug with geometrical designs. The people in the pictures were strange to him, and who had this many books? Then he remembered the coyotes and leapt from bed.
Immediately he yelped and fell to the rug. His ankle felt like spikes were being driven through it. By the time he had rolled over onto his knees, the door had opened with a bang. A tall balding man with a gray ponytail stood in the doorframe, supporting himself on an aluminum walker wound with colorful ribbons from which hung silver, red, and gold balls like Christmas ornaments. Hercel looked at it with surprise as he pushed himself up on his good leg and fell over on the bed. He saw that his right ankle had been wrapped with tape.
“We’re both crips now, aren’t we? We should have a race.” The man shuffled into the room and stuck out his big hand to Hercel. “I’m Barton Wilcox. We haven’t met yet. You had a nasty scare last night. You want some breakfast? You must be hungry. I’ve got an old crutch of Bernie’s we can probably adjust if you want to try it. Tig’s been asking when you’d wake up.”
As Hercel shook the man’s hand, Tig appeared in the door, followed by Bernie. She was the one who’d wrapped his ankle. They wore startled, expectant expressions, which relaxed as they saw Barton and Hercel shaking hands.
“I know where that crutch is,” said Tig, and she disappeared.
“How do you feel, other than your ankle?” asked Bernie.
She wore a long green skirt and a loose white blouse, and her gray hair was in a bun. A variety of silver rings were on her fingers and thumbs, a variety of silver bracelets and silver chains hung around her neck, and she even had a variety of silver earrings. Hercel tried to calculate how much it must weigh.
He rubbed his shoulder. “My shoulder’s sore. Otherwise I’m fine.”
“And how’s the psychological damage?” asked Barton cheerfully.
Hercel looked at him questioningly.
“He’s trying to find a polite way of saying you were nearly eaten,” said Bernie, “and so it might have messed with your head.”
Hercel tentatively touched his forehead. “My head feels fine.”
Barton laughed. “Good, that’s all I cared about.”
Tig reappeared in the room with a crutch, and Bernie fiddled with the screws to make it shorter. In a moment, Hercel tried it, taking a step or two, and it seemed okay. In fact, he rather liked it.
“That’s great,” said Barton. “Let’s go eat breakfast, and then Bernie can take you home. Or you can help Tig feed the chickens if your ankle can stand it. Bernie called your mother last night to tell her you were fine.”
Hercel hobbled down a pine-paneled hall to a large kitchen. From the wooden beams hung strings of peppers and garlic, as well as bunches of thyme, basil, rosemary, and many other herbs. Hercel stared up at them. “Wow, do you cook with all these?”
Bernie laughed. “Only some of them. Barton has been growing herbs for the nine herbs charm. There’s mugwort, fennel, thyme, mayweed, lamb’s cress, nettles, chamomile, and the rest. I promise he’ll make a big mess in my kitchen.”
Hercel turned to Barton. “Are you a witch?”
Now it was Barton’s turn to laugh. “I’m a retired professor of English—Old English, as a matter of fact. The charm is from the tenth century, probably before. It protects against poisons and snakes. But what we need is a charm against coyotes. But here’s a bit of my translation.
“Nine herbs have power against nine poisons.
A serpent came crawling, he ripped a man in two
then Odin took nine Glory-Twigs,
hit the adder and it flew into nine parts.
Thus the apple stopped the poison,
so the snake would never again enter this house.
“They used apple juice and grease to mix the herbs into a salve. Of course, we don’t know if it helped anybody, but it couldn’t hurt, that’s the main thing. But eat, eat, before your breakfast gets cold.”
Bernie put pancakes on Hercel’s plate. There was real maple syrup. The others had already eaten, bu
t they sat with him at the table. Barton drank coffee; Bernie and Tig had cups of tea.
“Can you tell us what happened last night?” asked Bernie. “You were hurt and dazed when we found you. I suppose I should have called an ambulance, but the trouble with being a nurse for thirty years is I think I know best. I fixed you up the best I could and put you to bed. I had to sit with you for quite a while before you’d let me leave.”
Hercel had a faint memory of Bernie’s soothing voice talking to him as he lay in the strange bed. If he had dreams, he didn’t remember them. He told them of bicycling out of Brewster to visit Tig and see the farm. She had invited him, he thought, about a week ago.
“You should have called,” said Bernie. “I’d have picked you up.”
No, he wanted to ride his bike. He’d never gone that far out of town before, though he had ridden down to the beach and out to Burlingame. As to why he’d chosen that particular hour, Hercel only said that Mr. Krause had been mad at him, but he didn’t explain the difference between being frightened and being scared.
“And who’s Mr. Krause?” asked Barton.
So Hercel told them. He tried not to tell too much, but it was enough for Bernie and Barton to exchange looks.
“And why do you call him Mr. Krause?” asked Tig.
“He says it shows respect.”
“None of this tells us what happened,” said Barton, changing the subject. “So you began riding your bike out here. And then . . . ?”
“It got dark,” said Hercel.
He described how in the increasing darkness it became hard to stay on the road. So he began to walk the bike, but soon he heard the coyotes and began to hurry.
“You must have been terrified,” said Bernie.
Hercel thought about it. “All I thought about was staying on the road. I think I didn’t have time to be scared, at least not then.”
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